Trying to grasp the interplay between the US homeless crisis and the capital housing market can be a tad tricky at times. So often homelessness is viewed as the fallout of addiction or bad life choices, or the after affect of incarceration.

After the housing market crash which saw hundreds of thousands of Americans lose their homes, a large number of which were illegal foreclosures, we saw suddenly this overlap between the speculated value of a house and the often violent eviction of law-abiding home owners.

Not much happened in retaliation at first. Not until a couple years later when Occupy Wall Street ramped up did a true mass movement against criminal banks and reckless landlords finally connect in the public’s mind our perverse induced scarcity of resources where in fact none actually exists.

Those people you see sleeping on benches would be housed in a just and equitable society, and we wouldn’t have to build a damn thing.

Streetwise is a 1984 documentary film by director Martin Bell. It followed in the wake of a July 1983 Life magazine article, “Streets of the Lost”, by writer Cheryl McCall and photographer Mary Ellen Mark, Bell’s wife.